Abstract

“If we don't tackle climate change, with the kinds of disasters that are lurking in our future, a single event could reverse years of development success in individual countries,” World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim said at a 9 October forum at the start of the bank's 2013 annual meeting in Washington, D. C. The current annual cost of responding to natural disasters is about U.S. $6 billion, and that projection suggests that the cost could increase to up to $1 trillion a year by the year 2050, Kim said.